“Why don’t you leave me here?” suggested Sylvia.  “I’ll walk home.  That’ll leave room for one more.”

“Oh, you can’t do that!” protested Molly faintly, though she was evidently at once struck with the plan.  “How’d you find your way home?” She turned to her cousin.  “See here, Austin, why don’t you take Sylvia home?  You ought to go anyhow and see Grandfather.  Hell be awfully hurt to think you’re here and haven’t been to see him.”  She threw instantly into this just conceived idea the force which always carried through her plans.  “Do go!  I feel so grateful to these men I don’t want one of them to walk a step!”

Sylvia had thought of a solitary walk, longing intensely for isolation, and she did not at all welcome the suggestion of adapting herself to a stranger.  The stranger, on his part, looked a very unchivalrous hesitation; but this proved to be only a doubt of Sylvia’s capacity as a walker.

“If you don’t mind climbing a bit, I can take you over the gap between Hemlock and Windward Mountain and make a bee-line for Lydford.  It’s not an hour from here, that way, but it’s ten miles around by the road—­and hot and dusty too.”

“Can she climb!” ejaculated Molly scornfully, impatient to be off with her men.  “She went up to Prospect Rock in forty minutes.”

She high-handedly assumed that everything was settled as she wished it, and running towards the car, called with an easy geniality to the group of men, starting down the road on foot, “Here, wait a minute, folks, I’ll take you back!”

She mounted the car, started the engine, waved her hand to the two behind her, and was off.

The lean, stooping man looked dubiously at Sylvia.  “You’re sure you don’t mind a little climb?” he said.

“Oh no, I like it,” she said listlessly.  The moment for her was of stale, wearied return to real life, to the actual world which she was continually finding uglier than she hoped.  The recollection of Felix Morrison came back to her in a bitter tide.

“All ready?” asked her companion, mopping his forehead with a very dirty handkerchief.

“All ready,” she said and turned, with a hanging head, to follow him.

CHAPTER XXVII

BETWEEN WINDWARD AND HEMLOCK MOUNTAINS

For a time as they plodded up the steep wood-road, overgrown with ferns and rank grass, with dense green walls of beech and oak saplings on either side, what few desultory remarks they exchanged related to Molly, she being literally the only topic of common knowledge between them.  Sylvia, automatically responding to her deep-lying impulse to give pleasure, to be pleasing, made an effort to overcome her somber lassitude and spoke of Molly’s miraculous competence in dealing with the fire.  Her companion said that of course Molly hadn’t made all that up out of her head on the spur of the moment.  After spending